Suicide Girls Must Die! (2010)

I mean, I get what they were trying to do. Shoot the 2010 Suicide Girls’ calendar out in the woods, and double-dip into the tax write-off territory by positioning it as a film also. As if they realized, after 5-10 years of being in the retro-burlesque business, that “moving pictures” exist, and their bread-and-butter – still shots, are effectively passe in a world with high-speed internet and tons of porn.

They must’ve figured that they tap into the horror market. Those guys are lonely and undersexed, right? It’ll be a homerun!

So the girls go out into the woods to shoot a calendar while filming what amounts to a pilot to a really bad HBO reality series. One of the girls messes with some tombstones they found outside the cabin, and disappears. Then others disappear, and no one is the least bit concerned. Not the lady in charge, nor any of the other girls; who, one assumes, would be friends with at least one of the victims.

You can just barely tell, but here the Suicide Girl has an axe positioned over her crotch. Because they’re sexy and dangeruos! Get it?

Maybe this film is more effective if you know the girls. Like it operates on a reversed Hollywood system. One where you’re expected to know the actresses and identify with them as people, rather than be a character. Which must be why the film’s seams become so apparent when a real actor shows up. When the third girl goes missing, and is abandoned on a remote island, the cops are finally called. A cop (Brandon Stumpf), mind you, who looks like the stereotypical hopeful actor/hunk – a bit surprising since the Suicide Girls, as an entity, positions itself as alternative beauty.

I guess this film would be okay if it was a double tax write venture where everyone improvised. Cuz that’s the only way I could accept a story this horrible. People go missing, no one cares until the third one’s gone. The third missing girl is found, and no explanation on how she became lost or why neither group could hear the other since they both were screaming. One girl gets tied up and covered in blood, yet didn’t see a bit of her attacker.

Two girls find a camera with footage of the first girl being murdered. They’re in the video control van watching the snuff footage when they’re murdered. So now there’s four girls missing, another who could’ve easily been murdered, and no one thinks to, I don’t know, go into the control van and check any of the footage shot in the past three days.

And why oh why, if you’re making a film with nothing but amateurs, would you write two crying scenes? Crying convincingly on camera is something most professionals can’t do effectively.

In the end, Suicide Girls Must Die! isn’t bad meaning bad, or even bad meaning good. Nor is it so bad it’s good. It’s the worst kind of garbage, it’s pap – completely meaningless and inconsequential. Right down to the ending, where we find out that they were all alive after all! It was all a dream; or, in this case, a ruse! An ending that just underlines the pointlessness of it all. To quote one of the girls, “It makes me look gullible, it makes me look foolish.” It certainly does, honey, it certainly does…